This image is made up of 4, portrait oriented images, stitched together.

Standing (safely) on the first mound of shelf ice. I say "safely" because I know the beach is underneath me, not cold Lake Michigan. If I were to venture any further to the right, I would be standing on ice that formed over water, and was only connected to the shore at the surface - like a shelf; hence the term "shelf ice."

Barely visible are two people walking down the beach - they certainly give some scale to the amount of ice here at the shore. It extends hundreds of feet out into Lake Michigan. The wind and waves kick up the floating drift ice, it piles up near the shore in mounds over 15 feet tall. Then a calm period follows where more drift ice forms, followed by another windy day of ice piling up, and so on. This creates the series of ice mounds seen here.

About Tom

Environmental and landscape photographer Tom Gill captures the natural and man made wonders of the southeastern portion of Lake Michigan, particularly lighthouses, the National Lakeshore, barns, and small town nostalgia. Tom is a blogger on The Huffington Post, and has earned international recognition for his photography, with publication in the Huffington Post, the Daily Mail, the Australian, Melbourne and Victoria Herald Sun, Adelaide Now,Civil War Times, Weatherwise Magazine, Backpacker Magazine, American Motorcyclist, and other major newspapers and magazines. The Weather Channel, CNN, ABC,NBC, WGN news affiliates, and countless online media outlets have also featured his work. Tom holds a Fine Arts Degree in design from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and aside from photography, enjoys woodworking, sketching, painting, and hiking with his family.

To purchase prints of the photographs featured on Tom's blog, on his flickr pages, or on his Google + pages, contact the photographer directly at